/r/Games is for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Please look over our rules and FAQ before posting. If you're looking for "lighter" gaming-related entertainment, try /r/gaming!

The goal of /r/Games is to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just with the goal of entertaining viewers.

For me, it would be bad menus. Its 2012 2013, I have a hard time imagining why companies still have a hard time designing menus for games. Its not like its the hardest thing to do, and completely unacceptable to me to skimp out on them. A good recent example of this would be the AC3 weapon select menu. They used to have the weapon select wheel, which is a perfectly fine way to browse your weapons, now they just have a list that you need to scroll through an entire list to get anything at the bottom. It completely ruined switching weapons mid battle If i had to scroll through a large list to find what I want.

FFXII gets bonus points for this. In order to get the best weapon in the game, you need to open a series of chests in the right order. They're not all in the same place, mind you, they look exactly like other chests, they're all over the game and if you open one up you can never undo it. Clearly a ploy to sell Strategy Guides. I guarantee no one has stumbled on that shit by accident. "oh there's a chest, I don't think I'll open it yet in case it's part of some elaborate secret"

You got it backwards: You need to NOT open four specific chests in the game, no fewer than two of which you WILL walk past.

Firt one is outside Old Dalan's house. You have to visit him a couple times and the chest is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU as soon as you exit. It's RIGHT THERE, screaming "open me!" and if you do, you've fucked yourself out of the spear less than half an hour into the game.

Number 2 is in the palace cellar. It's in a corner and if you explore a little, you'll walk past it but you could theoretically never notice it.

Number 3 is in the confiscatory of the Nalbina Dungeons. After the arena fight, you are plopped in a room wherein you get back your "lost" stuff and in front of you are THREE chests. One has a gambit, one has a tourmaline ring, and one has about 500 gil. If you open the 500 gil chest, no spear.

Number 4 is in the phon coast, there are actually 16 chests in a 4x4 grid that are linked to the 16 chests in a 4x4 grid in Nabudis. Now, if you're ballsy, you can hit up Nabudis before you go to Phon coast (I always do) and it's possible that you'll bypass the Phon Coast chest in Vaadu Strand that's tied to the Zodiac Spear chest. But in a weird twist of fate, since both sets of chests directly link to each other, if you get the spear AND the other 15 chests when you're in Nabudis, you'll end up with 15 knots of rust and screw yourself out of the other 15 chests in Phon Coast that give a bunch of much nicer loot.

Seriously, I love FF12 and all... but that's terrible design.

It kinda reminds me of The Immortal for NES/Genesis that has an item you need to obtain early on and CAN NOT beat the final boss without it and CAN NOT go back to get it if you miss it.

It kinda reminds me of The Immortal for NES/Genesis that has an item you need to obtain early on and CAN NOT beat the final boss without it and CAN NOT go back to get it if you miss it.

King's Quest V had a part where you could do a task two different ways, but one of the ways used an item that you needed at the very end of the game. If you happened to choose the second way, four or six hours later, you'd find the game could not be completed.

Even if it isn't a point of no return, I hate the "two paths, one is a dead-end but has a hidden item" pattern. If I'm playing a linear game that does it (one that springs to mind is Black Mesa) then I spend the entire game turning around and going back to junctions if I feel like I've gone too far for my current route to be a dead end. If both options are long, or you get surprised by actual choice in the middle of a game, you can end up running backwards and forwards like a chicken trying to get round a fence.

edit: Thought the parent comment meant dead ends and not points of no return!

One of my favorite games, the two Golden Sun GBA titles, unfortunately suffered from this. One of their very few flaws.

Even worse, often times there are decently long ways to treasure chests which contain complete bullshit. Like some healing item that heals one character for 300 health when you've been using your far superior Psyenergy for the last 20 hours without using one of those items anyways.

But because there are of course some treasure chests worth checking out you are forced to go to every single one you see, no matter how far away :/

I really wish more games would only put a treasure chest somewhere when actually something great is in it. Then you can get excited without ending up disappointed 80% of the time.

Alternatively, play "Ceville", a german adventure game about a fantasy king trying to get his throne back. It had a child character who had an amazing voice actress in the english version (which is double weird, considering it's a translation of a low budget game)

And there is a HUGE cutscene, like 10 mins long, unskippable, right before you start escorting him.

Oh, and he doesn't walk the same speed as you, either. If you just walk, he'll get ahead, but if you run, he'll fall behind, so you have to keep switching between the two to stay near him. And if you get more than a few inches away, he stops, with zero cover, and waits for you to get near him again. Even if he's being shot at and the reason you moved away was to get under cover.

I really don't think they should have missions like this in games until we reach a point where AI is much more advanced. I really wouldn't mind the escort missions, since they usually fit in to the story, but they just end up being incredibly frustrating. Watching an unarmed, weak, slow moving person shuffle slowly directly through a line of fire, get caught on a random barrel and run in to it for a few minutes, before deciding to go around.. Not only does it ruin immersion, but it takes success of the mission out of your hands. It's left up to if the AI decides to go full retard or not, this time.

It's hard to pick one thing, but this hits on a couple huge pet peeves of mine. Forcing me to sit through a poorly written, horribly acted cut scene is torture. Special mention goes to those incompetent devs who put checkpoints before unskippable cutscenes when they know you're going to replay the section a couple times. Everybody hates checkpoints before unskippable cutscenes, why in god's name are they still in video games today?

Less of a big deal is unskippable intros. Some games do it okay by making the intros mandatory the first time through and then skippable every time after that and I understand that some games do some loading during the intros, but holy fuck I don't want to see the EA logo in every fucking game I play.

On top of unskippable cutscenes, why can't we pause them in more games, or even rewatch it? I can't spend a whole night gaming without distractions, which often occur during important cutscenes. Pausing helps here, or if we misunderstand a part we can rewind it, or view it later from the menu (games like LEGO Star Wars allow this).

My biggest pet peeve about cutscenes isn't about the games it's about that asshole who decides to come into my room and watch me playing a game and wait until the damn cutscene that I personally want to watch to then attempt to talk over the cutscene and split my attention between the two.

Seriously if you have something to say then ask me to pause the game during actual game play don't stand next to me and try to win my attention from the cutscene.

Seriously, I get very little gaming time as it is and it's inevitable that when a cut scene appears my wife or a kid needs me and I miss it with no choice but to replay content (maybe even the whole game) if I want to see it again. Some of them are viewable from the game folder but not always.

Unskippable intros (when you initially boot up a game) get on my nerves as well. I recently purchased Dark Souls, and the slogans just seemed to hover there forever... luckily, there are usually .ini tweaks for those sorts of things. Not so much luck with in-game cutscenes, though.

worst used to be civ 5 before the recent patch. they played a 1080p movie each time you booted the darn game and loaded the game in the background so you had to watch the first 30 seconds of it. you can't tell me that playing that 1080p movie isn't slowing down the loading times....

Paper mario the thousand year door.
It was a good cutscene, but it was like 10 goddamn minutes long, and you had to be pressing the A button the whole time. That's not the bad thing, you enjoy the cutscene THE FIRST TIME. It's right before the final boss fight, and you have to watch it again EVERY TIME YOU DIE

Constant Mission Reminders. I've been enjoying Far Cry 3 lately, but nothing breaks immersion more than a little box in the corner reminding me every 15 seconds I should go meet Citra. There's no way to turn it off. It's like the game thinks I have short term memory loss and need to be reminded of my objectives or else I'll forget. They could've just put a "journal" feature that does the same thing in the pause menu but no, they need to flash it in front of you every 15 seconds.

You can turn off the quest notifications, actually--it was patched in after release (at least on PC). It's in the Gameplay section of the Options menu.

Speaking of Far Cry 3, though, why on earth is there no key to take me directly to the crafting menu? Or the inventory, or the handbook? Literally every other game with an inventory system does this, Ubisoft...

I haven't played Skyward Sword, but I've played OoT, WW and TP. I went back to continue from an old save file on TP about a year ago and realised I had genuinely no idea what I was supposed to do, and there was an extreme lack of a 'journal' or something similar.

I think Minda or whatever her name is will point you in the right direction.

In SS, a cutscene or NPC will tell you what to do. Then after taking five steps, your "Navi" character will then automatically pop up...and basically repeat the same thing. It happens all the time and infuriated me.

Binary moral choice systems, particularly where the difference between good and evil is a choice between acting like the patron saint of lost causes or a Hitler/Stalin amalgam following a transporter accident.

I know it's very difficult to write good (believable), neutral choices but they could at least try. I'm looking at you Infamous!

Seriously, when it comes down to crap like this I tend to just start looking at what will give me the best stuff rather than how I'm playing the game.

I tend to just start looking at what will give me the best stuff rather than how I'm playing the game.

This is what completely breaks moral systems in games for me. If I'm going to be gaining anything valuable from the choice, then I'm going to base my decision off of that reward. It's only when the reward is gone or negligible that I'll actually start making decisions based on a moral standard like the developers intended.

The main issue I have with this is that evil tends to equal stupid. Sure, I might not give a rats ass about these rebels or their cause, but that doesn't make it clever to insult their mothers to their face while standing alone in the middle of their camp.

To borrow Penny Arcade's analogy, it comes down to Help the Puppies or KILL THE PUPPIES.

Ostensibly "good" options generally work out, but evil options become completely nonsensical in a lot of situations. The proper "evil" response to the puppies would be to ignore the fuck out of them and get on with your eviling.

Seriously, when it comes down to crap like this I tend to just start looking at what will give me the best stuff rather than how I'm playing the game.

This is fucking killing me in KOTOR 2. I'm replaying it for the first time in years because a big restoration patch was released. It's a huge and well-written game, with intriguing characters and plenty of opportunity to make choices more philosophical than you find in most games; the story and characters are explored things in shades of grey rather than stark black and white. The story, uncharacteristic for a Star Wars game, is literally about the grey area between good and evil.

Seems like a great game to just play the way I feel like it, answer the decisions as I personally would, and appreciate the awesome story, characters, and writing, right?

Well no, you need to be like at least 75% good or evil to unlock your advanced class, so I have to grind light side points every time they're available. And you need enough influence with your party members to turn them into jedi (which makes them much more useful in a fight) and unlock new story options, and influence points are quite rare, so I have to savescum conversations in order to appease them at every opportunity. Instead of just playing how I want or even being able to roleplay my character (the PC has an established backstory) I feel compelled to act completely out of character in order to get the gameplay bonuses. It's like I'm rping an insane, bipolar jedi.

I'm thinking of just downloading a savegame editor and setting my relevant points to 100/100 or whatever and then just completely ignoring the light/dark and influence mechanic for the rest of the game.

Oh jesus. "The devs obviously took a long time designing this ridiculously complicated to reach part of the map for a reason. There must be some kind of great reward for it." "You've unlocked an Achievement!" "FUCK!"

I get bummed out when background stuff doesn't have subtitles. A option for 1). no subs 2). main story/cutscene subs 3). everything audible around you subs. I want to say HL2 had these options, but I could be wrong.

Bad quality subtitles, too. In AC3 the timing of the subtitles is terrible, sometimes cutting sentence in half randomly, other times disapearing so fast that people are unable to read them. This is the case even with the parts when they speak in Connors native language, which kind of pisses me off.

Games that start when you open them the first time, instead of having a "start" button and an "options" button. DON'T YOU PEOPLE SEE THAT I NEED TO ACTIVATE THE SUBTITLES AND CHANGE THE STUPID DEFAULT RESOLUTION BEFORE THE GAME STARTS???

I bought NHL13 on PS3, as soon as the game starts it connects me to the EA servers automatically, which requires me to have an Origin account, no big deal. I accept both of the EULAs and then put in my login ID and password. It tells me that it's an invalid password. I login using my PC, lo and behold the password is correct. I reset the password and try again, no dice.

There is literally no way to exit out of this login screen, there is either continue or update contact information. Continuing would use an email address that is no longer valid (an email address which was created about 6 years ago, PSN still defaults to it for some reason). I could probably log out of PSN and try again, but why should I? This renders the online portion of the game completely unusable, assuming it works.

I live in China. Most games requiring online activation are unplayable due to either them being blocked or, much more commonly, the servers are blocking everyone that connects from China.

I'm now refusing to play games that require online activation to even use at all. Based on rumors, the new consoles may be where I stop buying consoles.

Seriously, it kills it all. It's going too far to me. And what about people that aren't fortunate enough to live in first world countries full of Internet ? I guess just fuck them, right? It's just seriously screwing people for more money. Money I can use on other things.

As a server administrator who has to deal with security, fuck China and fuck all of China's netblocks. Sorry mass-blocking an entire country inconveniences you personally but we're all just trying to survive here.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any established standard for this. In some games pressing start will pause the cut scene, in others it will skip it without asking, in others it won't do anything. The only way to find out what it does is to actually try it, which - more often than not - just skips the cut scene and makes you miss out on a part of the game.

I'm fond of the "Pause, and display actions you can take" version. I think it's the more recent Final Fantasy games that implemented it (12, 13, 13-2). I have no idea why this wouldn't be a universal standard.

The single most unforgivable thing in video games is "games as a service". By removing the idea of a product they've created an entire industry of subscription and microtransaction. Even better than that, in order to pull it off they had to require online interaction for quite a few titles including single player games. Due to "Games as a service" we've lost LAN, offline single player is dying, nobody can collect certain games because once the server goes down the game can't be played anymore.

Woah, I never really thought about the decline in characterizing video games as as product.

This really blew my mind. My first system was an NES, then sega genesis, N64, dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, and then Xbox 360 & PC.

I'd say (and this is just pure conjecture) that the defining quality of a game being a product started to decline during the end (maybe mid) Xbox life cycle beginning of 360.

A service (to me) is something along the lines of Sirius XM. I don't purchase all the stations and listen for free, they are streamed based off a service I pay monthly for.

A game is something I purchase in full, I own the physical media it is stored on, I stream it to my TV/Monitor, it's therefore a product because its tangible, within reach, and the consumer has control over it.

At this point I'm rambling but damn, I never looked at games like this before.

This bothers me more than it should. Cheat codes are supposed to be fun and used in jest after you've beaten the majority of the game (my favorite cheat codes are ones you can only use after you've unlocked them through certain specific goals you achieve in the game). A lot of games that have in-game cheat codes and achievements are able to at least lock them out from being earned when using a cheat code. But yeah, most games I see don't have cheat codes these days. You need to find either trainers (and that scum website cheathappens wants you to charge money for something a basic programmer can cook up) or use a memory editor (like ArtMoney).

The 'games as a service' mantra here is interesting to examine, seeing as it was Valve who pioneered the term. Meanwhile, the games on their Steam platform are almost entirely buy-once-play-forever, with primarily F2P MMOs breaking that model. Perhaps in this context the 'games as a service' idea is the combination of DRM, single-user applications, and always-on connections within these games?

EDIT: I am declaring my screening process a success, as I have played almost none of the games mentioned thus far in responses to this post. (Although this is probably just a side effect of my genre preferences.)

Far Cry 3 seems to have fixed this. You clear out an outpost, your guys move into the area and the bad guys move out, for the most part. Those big cats are still a problem though.. FC3 is pretty awesome and awesomely pretty.

As much as I LOVE Far Cry 3, I actually have a problem with the capture mechanic.

Once you take an outpost, its yours, period. There's no dynamism and once all the outposts are captured (which is the most fun part of the game imo) there's not much else to do outside of story missions.

I would have loved to see some attempts by pirates to take back the outposts.

This is basically just really lazy level design. The biggest standout offender in my experience was DMC4 in which something between 35-50% of the levels were you just running through previous levels in reverse. Maybe it wasn't quite that much, but it certainly felt like it.

it bugs me when the "difficulty" comes from giving an enemy a large amount of health. That's not difficulty, that's just tediousness. The part where you attack him with those "allies" and you have your sword was even more boring because he seemed to have 30 times more health than the fist fight.

Awful UIs/input/etc. Play your fucking game before you release. Ask a friend to come in and play it. If their reaction is "What the fuck is happening, how do I even this menu?", probably fix that shit before release.

10 minutes? that's a little extreme. I get what you're saying, sometimes I forget to save and I'll lose an hour or so of progression, so I can only imagine what it'd be like with a game that doesn't let you save wherever.

Also, a single save slot. It's pretty annoying with some console ports to PC, if a bud comes over and wants to try a game in my machine, he either has to delete my save in order to start over and play the intro, or load my progress, not understand what it's all about since he didn't play from the start, and make me miss some content.

I absolutely loved Oblivion for this reason. Sometimes you'd get two voice actors talking to another, then it'll be the same voice actor talking to him/herself. I like how they just scripted random conversations together, so it could go,

There's an ridiculous amount of amateur voice actors that would do that for 50 bucks. Because everybody is always taking the same voice actors (I'm looking at you, Jennifer Hale!), newcomers would even pay you for a job from a company like Bethesda just to not be the guy who never did anything.

"Oh, a cutscene. Let me just sit back and watch a little clip of animation before regaining control over my character and -"
[PRESS R] [PRESS A] [PRESS X]
*Your character is a bloody pulp. Please start again from the checkpoint ten levels ago.*"WHAT THE FUCK"

Seriously, this. I tried to play Bulletstorm awhile ago and it kept asking me for my serial key, and then told my that the serial was in use on the account that it was bound to. No way to get out of the menu without signing out, which would disable saving. I had to crack a game that I own and have played through before because the DRM was telling me that I didn't own it.

Also I want to nominate Uplay for next worse DRM system. I own the latest Prince of Persia game (god help me, etc, etc) on Steam. I need to sign into Uplay to play the game, which means I need two accounts. I got an email the other day:

Dear Pharnaces

Your Uplay account email or password has been changed successfully! If you did not request this change please contact Ubisoft support

Ubisoft

Obviously I thought this was spam, so I went to login to the Uplay client and lo and fucking behold, my account didn't work. They let someone change my email address and password with zero confirmation from me (I know my email wasn't compromised because I change the password every week and only access it from a computer I know is malware free). I now cannot play a game that I legally own and have installed on my computer because the DRM client on top of the DRM client with additional DRM let someone change the account information. I don't really care that I lost the game, it was crap, but that I 1) have to contact fucking support to get my account back and 2) that there is DRM on top of DRM on top of DRM.

I'll never buy a game that requires Uplay again because I don't want to deal with this shit.

PC games that have gotten lazy or shitty ports. Is the FPS capped at 30? Does that AAA game have nearly no graphical options besides gamma? If I hold 't' do I get a dpad or wheel oof choices? Nothing makes me feel like a second rate customer more and puts me off AAA games.

Not 'unforgivable' but I hate PC ports that have a UI that only makes sense on consoles. ACII comes to mind by not allowing you to use the mouse when shopping/quick travel via sewers. A point and click UI makes perfect sense, yet you have to use arrow keys/scroll wheel.

Playing Dragon Age, I was really hoping they'd have the balls to take my stuff and not give it back, just to up the struggle. Just to make the situation feel even more hopeless.
I then walked 3 feet from my jail cell and got all of my stuff back.
"Fuck this," I said, and then I escaped the dungeon with nothing equipped, like the game should have made me do in the first place.

RE5 on the PC has the worst menus I have ever used. It's a clunky ass selection system with a horrible, unreadable font from the 90s. Oh, and there's a menu inside the first menu, and from that menu you can go to the menu which let's you play the game. It even has stuff like time limits on continue screens. I feel like I'm playing a cheap arcade game with modern graphics.

Railroading the PC by forcing them to "voluntarily choose" do something stupid in games which allow you to customize your character.

I don't mind railroading as rule. It's a valid story mechanic. But don't pretend I have a choice in the matter, especially when the rest of the game is all about me actually having a choice in the matter. Even this can be acceptable if the PC is allowed to express their awareness of and frustration with being railroaded.

Simply forcing the PC to pretend that a stupid railroaded action was their idea is a horrifying breach of the player's inner image of their character, something I find very sacred.

The biggest offender in recent memory was Dragon Age II. There's a certain point in the game where someone asks you to help them, despite the fact that doing this will clearly anger nearly every faction in the game and result in at least rioting if not full scale war. The player has the choice of agreeing and disagreeing, so I did the sane thing and said "Fuck no."

I keep playing and finish nearly every other side quest, but I can't seem to progress in the main quest because the NPCs still say they're preparing for the journey. I go ready a strategy guide which says that you need to help the person and start a war in order for the main quest to proceed. I said fuck it and uninstalled the game on the spot and never looked back.

I'm already playing video games, so I already am wasting my time, but I want to at least enjoy it. It's what I disliked about the sticker mechanic in the new Paper Mario. Why am I running back to town after every level to get more stickers? Why is this in the game? Because it isn't fun.

Open world games that don't have reasonable quick travel systems absolutely blow my mind. The perfect example of a game just plain getting it wrong is AC3 which actually had a quick travel system, but you had to traverse long, boring underground mazes to unlock new quick travel points. That's stupid enough without considering that the previous AC games had the typical "find and unlock" system that worked fine.

Instant failure. Do not force me to be stealthy in a shooter and definitely do not instant fail me when I get caught. I have a fucking gun. I can solve the problem I created. Punish me, don't failure me. I should have the option to be stealthy or not.

Hand holding. Straight out of cod campaigns. Do not force me to look a specific way, do a specific thing, and constantly yell at me to do it. This is an interactive video game. Not a point and click slideshow of explosions.

Poor checkpoints. If you don't allow me to quicksave. You better not bullshit checkpoint me with no ammo right before I died.

There's plenty more I'm currently forgetting but let's leave it at that.

Pay to win. Monetization of powerful, non-cosmetic game items which you usually need to spend a lot of time to get(usually never).

Even worse, I seriously despise players who pay real money in pirate MMO servers to get a legendary item, specially when the admins changed the loot table from the original game so it doesn't drop anymore.

On the other hand, I don't think badly of these said admins. They're doing a fine job parting fools from their money.

Interesting, I had to actually think for a bit "what quick time events?" and I played the game for 60 hours. You're talking about the fighting sequences needed to pull people out of vehicles?

I've always thought of quick time events as something unsuspected that happens during cinematics trying to catch you off-guard (like RE4). In JC2 it was expected and I thought of it as trying to simulate quick reactions needed for blocking/punching and I didn't mind it at all.

I think the QTEs in Just Cause 2 were barely noticeable because there really wasn't any consequence for getting it wrong and it was very forgiving. If you make me watch some asshole Monologue for 5 minutes for failing a QTE, I'm going to notice that a lot more than falling off a truck and getting right back on it again.

You're talking about the fighting sequences needed to pull people out of vehicles?

Exactly. You're there, jumping from car to car with your grappling hook, blasting enemies out of the road, nonstop action, and then, 'press 1234 to punch the guy'. Maybe it's just me, but I really feel like it breaks the flow of the action. I mean, the first Mercenaries didn't have them no matter if you were hijacking a civilian vehicle or an enemy tank, and I never felt like the game was any less challenging for that.

Not that I feel JC2 to be any less fun to play for that, mind you; it's still plenty of fun.

I'm ok with this kind of thing, since it's consistent (QTE on plane jacking, hacking, etc.), it feels more like a mini game than QTE. The Press X to not die (warning! TV tropes) pisses me off the most.

Not allowing gender selection in games where the characters gender doesn't affect the story (Gender specific races/classes). It pissed me off as far back as Baldur's Gate, and it amazes me that something so simple still isn't somewhat standard these days. If it's part of the story, then I can understand that. But if it's just a goddamn MMO where the character is my avatar, it really pisses me off to have to play as the opposite sex. It ruins some of the immersion for me, especially because there's no real reason that the character has to be that one sex.